While reading all the comments I could not get my thoughts together, I now think I see what is going on.
Some people are spending a lot of time learning how to get good value out of xxx hosting company choosing the correct type of instances to rent etc., other people would rather spend their time understanding how servers work and build their own servers. (Then you have the time to find a good colocation setup if you build your own servers.)
I now thank that EC2 offers a few main benefits.
a) You can scale down without having to take a big loss by un-capitalizing your hardware investment.
b) A small monthly bill you are not commit too, is a lot easier to get approved then buying lots of machines.
c) If it all goes wrong you can blame someone else! I think this is the best reason to use EC2...
d) If you only need very low powered servers for a short time, then EC2 cannot be beaten.
e) You can believe you can stale up next week if needed without having costs this week.

In 1998 I briefly worked for FiringSquad, a gaming website founded by Doom and Quake champion Thresh aka Dennis Fong and his brother Kyle. I can trace my long-standing interest in chairs and keyboards to some of the early, groundbreaking articles they wrote. Dennis and Kyle were great guys to w...

If just stackExchange and grit hub agreed on a “standard” AND STOPPED USING their current in-house system it would be a good start.
So a converter for all the content that has already been created must be part of the effort.

Markdown is a simple little humane markup language based on time-tested plain text conventions from the last 40 years of computing. Meaning, if you enter this… …you get this! Lightweight Markup Languages ============================ According to **Wikipedia**: > A [lightweight markup lan...

Being in the court of the king is not a problem; provided you have the option to leave and you don’t lose your stately home by defecting to another king.
The problem is that the king has locked developer in by having an API and language that is so different to any other kingdom.
Users are locked in to a lesser extent by having to rebuy all their apps (and music) if they move to another kingdom.
So for new king to get a large kingdom, what about the new king giving free credits to buy apps to any users to move other and making it as easy as possible for a developer to move as well?
As a developer you could implement a web app instead of an iPhone app; however that is like being a mouse that sits until the king’s table eating some of the crumbs, rather than being a servant that gets to eat the prime left over food.

I enjoy my iPhone tremendously; I think it's the most important product Apple has ever created and one they were born to make. As a consumer who has waited far too long for the phone industry to get the swift kick in the ass it so richly deserved, I'm entirely on Apple's side here. But as a so...